The Rudolf Steiner Archive

87. Natural Science at a Crossroads

[ 1 ] On Saturday evening, in the main hall of the Aubette, the well-known theosophist Dr. Steiner of Berlin delivered a lecture on the topic “Natural Science at a Crossroads,” which was received with great applause by the audience. In his characteristic, spirited manner, he characterized the creed of natural science as it had taken shape on the solid ground of facts over the course of the 19th century. According to this creed, the entire world of perception given to human beings has no objective reality, but is merely the effect of material processes in the world of atoms and their groupings upon the organs of perception. Colors and light, for example, are nothing in and of themselves, but rather the vibrations of the ether mediated by the sensory organs. Under such premises, a worldview has necessarily emerged that sees the imperishable and eternal only in “atomistically” conceived matter and must conceive of all soul processes as ceasing once the atomic combinations from which they arise have dissolved. Spiritual science, called theosophy, must regard the “world of atoms” as merely a product of intellectual fiction, devoid of objective reality. If one wishes to proceed from what the senses perceive to what lies at its root, then one can seek this only in spiritual reality; for it is only of the Spirit that human beings have not merely a fictional conception but direct experience, since the Spirit, in its true essence, is to be recognized within the innermost being of human beings. Sensory reality—the external world—is also to be recognized from the same Spirit, for in Theosophy this represents another form of the Spirit, as it were, a condensed Spirit—just as ice is the same as water, only in a condensed, solid form. Spiritual science stands in a similar relationship to the materialistically colored scientific creed regarding the developmental processes of life and humanity. The latter seeks to understand all of humanity’s higher perfections by viewing them as higher stages of the lower forms and activities found in imperfect living beings. Language, for example, is said to be a more highly developed form of animal cries; thinking, a transformed form of animal imagination; and so on. The entire process of becoming is thus conceived in material terms, so that the ancestors of humankind are said to be found in the animal forms of prehistoric times. Spiritual science, on the other hand, shows that everything material in human beings is merely the effect and manifestation of the underlying spiritual, and that human beings are far more complex beings than the materialist worldview imagines. The human being comprises: first, the physical body, the coarsest material form; second, the etheric or life body, which underlies life; third, the astral body, which underlies consciousness; and fourth, the “I,” which underlies self-consciousness. The latter three components of the human being are of a spiritual nature, and the spiritual preceded the physical. Before lower animals existed, human beings existed as spiritual beings; they developed into their present form by giving themselves a physical form out of the spiritual. However, over the vast span of time, beings always remained behind at the various preliminary stages that human beings went through and, in a sense, separated from themselves in the course of their perfection; these preliminary stages are the lower, animal beings. Thus, humankind did not arise through the perfection of lower beings (Darwinism), but rather these lower beings are the brothers of humankind who have lagged behind in their development. In the sense of true spiritual science, humankind is the “firstborn” of the Earth, even though its material form appeared last of all natural beings. Now, it is not the facts of natural science that contradict these spiritual-scientific investigations, but rather a kind of creed that has been constructed from them. On the contrary, the facts themselves point precisely toward the same view held by spiritual science. The atom, which until recently was still considered “eternal and imperishable,” can no longer withstand the findings of modern research. The phenomena observed in radium and similar substances have literally dissolved the old concept of the atom into itself. And anyone who is no longer under the spell of prejudices, but instead grasps the upheaval in the concepts dictated by the facts, can already see the natural sciences today on a path that needs only to be followed a few more steps to converge with spiritual science. The same is true, however, of the theory of evolution. Under the weight of the facts, humanity’s animal ancestors have been entirely removed from the ranks of currently living beings, and the latest scientific research is faced with hypothetical ancestors that neither geology nor paleontology can find. Here, too, the natural sciences have already set their course toward humanity’s purely spiritual ancestors. It will take some time yet, but then—not through imagined concepts, but through the clear language of facts—reconciliation will be possible between the natural sciences and the humanities, and thus between faith and knowledge. Thus, we have now come significantly closer to the moment that Schiller, with his clairvoyant insight, may have longed for more than a century ago when he remarked of his own time, “that the natural sciences and the humanities were not yet developed enough to walk a common path, but still had to follow separate paths.”